Artists

Released on September 24, 1996, Illadelph Halflife marked a turning point in the Roots’ career from free-spirited jazz-hop players to soothsayers of doom. Much of rap music was obsessed with the Y2K apocalypse, the New World Order, and the presumptive demise of hip-hop – see De La Soul’s pivotal single “Stakes is High” – and the Philly ensemble was no exception. More than just Black Thought and Malik B launching cipher battles on “Uni-Verse at War,” and waging jeremiads against rapper “Clones,” the album sounds cloudy and introverted. The beats seem to mostly consist of organic bass, keyboards and drums, resulting in blue beats as sparse as a Wes Montgomery jam session, and moodily ominous vibes similar to contemporaneous works like A Tribe Called Quest’s Beats, Rhymes & Life, the Pharcyde’s Labcabincalifornia, and Slum Village’s Fan-Tas-Tic. When neo-soul and jazz guests like Raphael Saadiq (on “What They Do”), D’Angelo (on “The Hypnotic”), and Cassandra Wilson (on “One Shine”) appeared, they contributed pained vocals that contributed to the overall sense of melancholy.As a clear product of 1996’s pre-millennium tensions, Illadelph Halflife may have not aged as well as the band’s next album, the more successful Things Fall Apart. Its deeply rooted entropy is more suited for late-night listening, or perhaps the kind of contemplative smoke-out sessions the Black Thought, Malik and Bahamadia rhyme about on “Push Up Ya Lighter.” However, it established a theme. Led by drummer and group mastermind Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, the Roots have continued to assess cultural and political trends with skepticism and occasional hope ever since.

Whats This Playlist All About? The slick synth-pop soul man carefully compiles a mix to go along with his new fourth album, Caer. Or, in his words, "Sometimes we brace and then fall. Sometimes we dont feel right. Sometimes we dont fall at all." (FYI, "caer" means "to fall" in Spanish.)

What You Get: George Lewis Jr., aka Twin Shadow, is as slick and shrewd of a playlist curator as he is an artist, so expect a well-crafted mix that reflects much of his own work. Some of his more obvious 80s influences—The Cure, Prince, even Bruce Springsteen—make an appearance, alongside some chirpy Japanese synth-pop (Yellow Magic Orchestra) and sax-infused jangle pop (Orange Juice). But Lewis isnt completely stuck in that decade, including some soulful hip-hop from Australian band Winston Surfshirt and atmospheric rap from Young Fathers.

Greatest Discovery: The soothing, slippery, nearly psychedelic electronic sprawl of Montreal duo The Beat Escapes "Moon in Aquarius.” The track comes from their debut album Life is Short the Answers Long, which is releasing the same day as Caer.

Does This Mix Serve as a Good Companion to Caer? Absolutely. Springsteen prepares you for the swinging, shimmering, Heartland-leaning pop of "Saturdays," featuring lovable sister trio HAIM. Meanwhile, the moody hip-hop of 6lack, the dark ambient of Grouper, and the melancholic piano of Nils Frahm come together beautifully on the doomy, Auto-Tuned burner "Little Woman."

Weve spent the better part of a decade watching Tyler, The Creator grow up. On the early Odd Future mixtapes, he embodied a particular type of post-adolescent id—petulant, terrifying, frequently brilliant, and consistently offensive. He gobbled cockroaches, incited multipleriots, declared that “rape’s fun,” squabbled with LGBT activists, and, ultimately, was banned from the UK and New Zealand. Throughout these various ordeals, he used his age as both a weapon—taunting “40-year-old rappers talking about Gucci”—and as a defense, confessing, “Im not a fucking role model, I know this/ Im a 19 year old fucking emotional coaster”.This was at least somewhat tolerable because Tyler and his friends were talented, and, perhaps more importantly, it was all presented as a joke. This wasn’t the crack-era nihilism of Mobb Deep or the urban-trench warfare of Tupac. It was a lot more low-stakes than that. O.F.’s various offenses were wrapped in the detachment and filters of post-Tumblr irony. If you were offended, you didn’t get it, and, if you didn’t get it, you were old, irrelevant, etc. Yeah, Tyler was a serious person, but he was also very serious about letting us know he’s not particularly serious. The dynamic was both exhilarating and confounding, but it hit a dead end. Cherry Bomb’s mishmash of cloned, clamoring N.E.R.D. beats was nearly unlistenable, and Tyler’s shouted adolescent angst schtick was wearing thin. He was still squabbling with his critics over saying “faggot,” and there was one hackneyed line (“Im so far ahead you niggas, Im in the future”) after another (“The boys a fucking problem like turbulence, boy”). The initial shock-of-the-new transformed into the tedium-of-the-rote, and even his admirers begin to wonder if there was actually any there there.Flower Boy is supposed to be his coming-out party. This is the point where Tyler pulls off the bandages, and reveals a true(r), more mature self. And, for the most part, it works. He still has the same tools in his kit—he’s still ripping off the Neptunes, and he’s still a very self-conscious provocateur—but he does refine, expand, and, ultimately, negate his prior persona. It’s an exciting and unexpected transformation. For our corresponding playlist, weve collected the albums key tracks, as well as its influences, collaborators and sample sources.The album hits a high point with “911/ Mr. Lonely.” The song is restless, sonically and thematically, skirting between various movements and motifs. The first few seconds sound like a lark, a tongue-in-cheek riff on the sort of pleading R&B love songs that serve as a decades-spanning through-line for that genre. Over a trainwreck of stacked drums, vocalist Steve Lacey coos, “call me, call me sometimes,” before quickly adding the punchline, “911.” Then the song shifts; the drums fall into place, a lovely, melancholic piano melody peeks through the haze, and Tyler emerges to deliver one of the albums most startling lyrics: “My thirst levels are infinity and beyond.” The line is both corny and transcending, and, throughout the song, Tyler mines the space between kitsch and confession, declaring himself the “loneliest man alive,” while referencing Elon Musk, Celine Dion and Hasbro toymaker Arto Monaco. Later in the song, he’ll admit that “I’ve never been good with bitches,” because “I’ve never had a goldfish.” ScHoolboy Q briefly appears, and declares Tyler an “old lonely-ass nigga.”The track is surprising, funny, a bit unstable, and aggressively self-negating. It’s also revealing and shocking in a way that is not merely “provocative.” Tyler’s comfort with ambiguity is one of the album’s defining qualities, and Tyler uses these gray spaces to his advantage. Much has been made of Tyler’s line about “kissing white boys,” and whether or not this means that Tyler is queer. It’s what everyone is talking about, except Tyler. Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter who Tyler hooks up with—he’s found new, exciting ways to make himself vulnerable, and, ultimately, Flower Boy works because it feels high-stakes. Tyler understands the old maxim that he needs to destroy in order to rebuild, and the danger inherent in that process has pushed him to create his most refined, focused, and satisfying work to date.

One of the ugliest figures in rap is obsessed with some of the prettiest music. But we should expect nothing less from Tyler, the Creator, a self-described “walking paradox” whose music has been obscured by his public persona ever since he disrupted rap with his Odd Future crew in 2008. You could be forgiven for writing him off entirely after reading his notoriously homophobic Tweets. He’s since walked back most of that language, and has perhaps even come out as gay—or at least inhabits a gay character on his 2017 album Scum Fuck Flower Boy.As a rapper and producer, he’s been open about his influences since day one, and theyre all over the place: Pharrell’s sweet falsettos and uneasy chord progressions; the alien pop and library music of Broadcast; late ‘80s R&B (not a lot of that on Spotify, sadly); the harsh provocation and technical wizardry of Eminem; the stagey, orchestral hip-hop of Jon Brion-era Kanye West. He’s particularly into deep album cuts and soulful music with cinematic aspects.There is still nobody quite like him, even outside music, with his brightly colored fashion line and Neverland-esque penchant for throwing carnivals. And while his music has developed a capacity for gentleness over the years, he’s still a man who will shout vulgarities, if only to drive people away so he can sit at the piano alone with his jazz chords.At any rate, the most interesting paradox of Tyler, the Creator is that while he always seemed bent on fame for himself and Odd Future, he never “dumbed down for dollars” a la JAY-Z—or seemed to ever consider watering down his art in any way.

The Joshua Tree wasn’t one of those albums that quietly arrived on record store racks one dewy morning, attracting a few raves and then enjoying a gradual build before changing the world. Instead, U2’s fifth studio album elicited a reception that in contemporary terms would be described as breaking the internet ten times over.Speaking as an ‘80s kid who listened to his cassettes of War and The Unforgettable Fire obsessively and could sense that something big was on the launch pad, I can tell you that everything about the album felt massive from the get-go. Sending the mass media and the band’s fast-expanding audience into maximum overdrive when it was released in the spring of 1987, The Joshua Tree was the subject of heavy promotion and hype, such that U2’s music and image seemed everywhere at once. According to a Newsweek story published the same week the band made the cover of Time, Island spent $100,000 in 1987 dollars on store displays alone. Not even Bono’s cold-ravaged voice put a damper on the hysteria when the band opened its sold-out North American tour in Tempe, Arizona, on April 2. That show included the first live performance of “With Or Without You,” which became the band’s first American No. 1 single a few weeks later. It would help drive sales for an album that eventually shifted 25 million units worldwide.And the rest is history, which, if we know anything about history, means we shouldn’t be surprised that it’s repeating itself in the form of a summer anniversary tour this year. It too feels massive—over one million tickets were snapped up in the first 24 hours of going on sale—even if no rock act will dominate the pop-culture landscape as forcefully as U2 once did. Indeed, just about every subsequent effort to achieve the same level of impact by U2 or later contenders reeked of an unseemly hubris or—in the case of that iTunes debacle—sheer stupidity.Yet The Joshua Tree is still huge and intimate all at once, which is a testament to the production skills of Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois (whose thumbprints were far more overbearing on The Unforgettable Fire) and to the big leap in songwriting acumen by a band who had mostly got by on bravura up to that point. True, there were glimmers of what was to come on songs like “40” on War and “I Threw a Brick Through a Window” on October, which now seems like a dry run for “Bullet The Blue Sky.” But this album is where U2 indisputably became U2, achieving the greatest synthesis of their various punk and post-punk influences—especially Joy Division, Echo & the Bunnymen, and the sorely underrated The Chameleons—and the most anthemic rock of Springsteen and The Clash. Bono also talked up his blues, gospel, country, and folk inspirations at the time, but thankfully they had yet to result in the kind of stodgy Americana that clogs up Rattle and Hum. Here’s our exploration of the fertile ground around the biggest of U2’s big moments.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

Not even a broken leg can stop Dave Grohl from rocking out—which is exactly what happened during the Foo Fighters’ 2015 tour of Europe. After a nasty tumble from a stage in Gothenburg, Sweden, sent him to the hospital mid-show, the dude then returned, and, chair-bound and coursing with meds, played for another two and a half hours. (Note: the Foos wound up cancelling the rest of the tour, so yeah, Grohl can be stopped, but like the Red Sox, who in fact had another game to win the 1986 World Series after this, the myth is far sexier than the truth.) I know Dan Auerbach and Jack White are super busy and productive, but they’re lightweights when compared to Grohl, a quintuple-threat singer, guitarist, drummer, producer, and filmmaker whose list of bands, collaborations, cameos, and cheeky Rock Hall induction appearances has grown exponentially since he joined the D.C. post-hardcore band Scream in 1988, two years before making history with Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic.Of course, all of us are familiar with the hard-rock portion of his CV: When Grohl isn’t banging out chart-topping records with Taylor Hawkins and the Foos, he has jammed with Queens of the Stone Age, Ghost B.C., Nine Inch Nails, Slash, and Sir Paul McCartney. (Their Sound City: Real to Reel collab, the “Helter Skelter”-like “Cut Me Some Slack,” most certainly qualifies as hard rock.) He also joined forces with Zep bassist John Paul Jones and QOTSA main man Josh Homme to form Them Crooked Vultures (who seem to be on hiatus nowadays—oh well). But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Grohl pops up all along the genre spectrum. In addition to serving as a one-man rhythm section for indie singer-songwriter Cat Power, he’s gotten his (new) rave on with The Prodigy and produced jammy, heartland twangster Zac Brown Band. He’s even laid down beats for some rapper called Diddy.Grohl’s omnipresence in rock music (mixed with his perpetually smiling, nice-guy persona) has annoyed more than a few critics, bloggers, and even fellow musicians in recent years. Google “Dave Grohl” and “annoying” and some awfully viper-like (and really quite clever) diss pieces pop up calling him both a punk-rock sellout and a phony. Outside of his teenage years, Grohl never was a punk; he’s been a rocker through and through. But that’s besides the point. The fact remains that Grohl will outlive us all and survive global warming. A century from now, he’ll be like Kevin Costner in Waterworld: sporting gills, sailing the all-consuming seas in a tattered catamaran, and jamming with any and every musician he encounters.

The late Ian Fraser Kilmister lived life as fast as Motörhead’s violently charging rock ’n’ roll. Of course, many readers will assume such a statement refers to the legendary bassist’s decadent reputation. After all, his appetite for drink, drugs, and sex (as chronicled in the 2010 documentary Lemmy) was insatiable and produced no shortage of outrageous tales (some false, but many quite true). But he also lived a fast life in terms of his art and creativity. As both a musician and actor, Lemmy was damn near everywhere. When he wasn’t leading one of the world’s most influential metal bands (who, it should be noted, dropped a posthumous covers compilation Under Cöver on September 1, 2017), he racked up an absurd number of side projects and guest spots onstage, in the studio, and on screen. Whether he was leading Wayne Kramer, Michael Davis, and Dennis Thompson of the MC5 through a raspy blowout of their proto-punk jam “Sister Ann,” popping up in Boys Don’t Cry’s cheesy “I Wanna Be a Cowboy” video, busting retro-rockabilly with HeadCat, unleashing the vicious “Shake Your Blood” with Dave Grohl’s Probot project, actually joining The Damned for a spell... you name it, he did it.Of course, all this action occurred after Lemmy had started Motörhead. Here’s the crazy thing: By the time he, “Fast” Eddie Clarke, and Phil “Philthy Animal” Taylor recorded the band’s thunderous, game-changing debut in the summer of 1977, he had already been in the rock ’n’ roll game for a dozen years. Most folks know he helped pioneer chugging space rock and proto-punk as a shaggy member of the mighty Hawkwind, but he also served time in two fantastic British Invasion-era outfits. In addition to playing guitar and singing in Sam Gopal (a deeply moody psych-rock outfit who released the cult favorite Escalator in 1969), he lent his services to The Rockin Vickers, a beat group unloading manic R&B rave-ups much like the early Who and Kinks. (They whipped-up a searing version of Pete Townshend’s “It’s Alright” in 1966.) And if all that weren’t enough, young Lemmy actually shared a flat with bassist Noel Redding, who helped him land a gig as a Jimi Hendrix roadie in the downtime between Sam Gopal and Hawkwind.Here’s to Lemmy—no human has ever embodied rock ’n’ roll abandon as passionately as you. Well, maybe Keith Richards. But as we all know, you were always a Beatles guy, one who just so happened to see the Fabs at the effin’ Cavern when you were 18. Insane!

Original photography by Tuyara Mordosova. Subscribe to the playlist here.The deceased LA artist Mike Kelly did something amazing in his art. Throughout much of his work, and most notably in his Memory Work Flats, a series two-dimensional sculptures that he created from 2001 up until his suicide in 2012, he grafted modern American bric-a-brac -- buttons, bottle caps, keys, coins, and pendants -- onto larger, wall-hung surfaces. As with the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock, the overall effect of these is initially overwhelming and cacophonic -- the viewer struggles to find a focus -- but a rhythm inserts itself eventually, and the collection of junk (there’s no other way to describe it) gains a more ethereal, transcendent form. Kelly has taken objects that ostensibly have little relationship to one another -- that were built to decay in trash dumps and street corner cracks -- and transformed them into a cohesive modern American, high-art sacrament.

In their patchwork, low-hi-art approach, Deerhunter provide a sonic counterpart to Kelly’s artwork. Over the past two decades, the Atlanta band has stitched together elements of ambient, Krautrock, shoegaze, lo-fi electro, post-punk, warped rockabilly, and classic pop for a sound that is, at turns, explosive, defuse, ugly, and ethereal. The songs are full of sex, noise, drugs, screeching feedback, Russian porn stars, wheezing vocals, detuned guitars, and tiny deaths. It’s ugly until it isn’t -- when the dissonance coalesces into melody, and the characters emerge from their chemical cocoons to search for forgiveness, redemption, or, at the very least, empathy. Like Kelly, they tend to build their own iconography from the minutiae of suburbia’s spiritual dissolution, and it’s both revolting and beautiful.

Deerhunter was formed in 2001 in Atlanta, Georgia. It included Bradford Cox, Moses Archuleta, and others who are no longer in the band. The band’s first album, 2005’s Turn it Up Faggot, is more or less unlistenable for those not attuned to the more noisey end of the punk rock spectrum, but the band quickly pivoted, bringing on guitarist and longtime Cox friend Lockett Pundt, who would serve as the band’s other primary songwriter and provide a more trad-rock ballast to Cox’s experimental, kitchen-sink approach. The sophomore album, Cryptograms, was recorded over two days in late 2005, but it took nearly 14 months for their new label, the venerable indie Kranky, to release it. When fans finally heard Cryptograms, many were taken aback. The album was a fairly drastic departure; the jagged, lacerated guitar work of the original was replaced with atonal ambient textures, dadistic pop tunes, and nods towards a Southern Gothic strain of shoegaze. Traces of their earlier, noisy sound remained though, and the overall effect was that of a e listener fine-tuning the dial of a old radio knob, slowly bringing clarity and a bit of pop refinement (if not exactly polish) to the band’s lurking, free-range noise sensibilities. 2008’s Microcastle/ Weird Era saw the group continue to focus their aesthetic. There were actual songs, for one thing. The jangly “Agoraphobia” remains one of their most catchy and tender tracks. There’s a wisp of Sonic Youth’s no wave guitar fuzz, but largely the album is dedicated to taut, post-punk jams like “Nothing Ever Happened” or the great “Never Stops.” As you’ve probably been able to pick up, Deerhunter’s career has a certain arc, beginning with noise bedroom and blog jams of their early years to the learner, more traditionally structured indie rock of Microcastle. It’s not that their more recent work is without value -- 2013’s Monomania traffics in Krautrock and psych to bleary and occasionally beautiful results; while 2015’s jangling, Southern-fried Fading Frontier is the hangover from Monomania’s ridiculous affectations -- but 2010’s Halcyon Digest remains the group’s high-water mark. It’s an album were the band finally boiled down their disparate, oftentimes contradictory influences into a sound and emotional palette that felt uniquely theirs.The album title is a bit of a put on; in Cox’s telling -- it’s meant as a dig at the temptations of nostalgia -- but, otherwise, the album is emotionally and sonically accessible. The gorgeous “Helicopters,” with it’s chiming, elegiac melodies and plees for prayer, is probably the closest the group ever got to pure pop, while “Revival” is a swamy, garage blues burner.But the album’s centerpiece is “He Would Have Laughed.” That song manages to shift movements and melodies without seeming overly cluttered or fussy, and while the lyrics and Cox’s vocal performance is dark and tinged with death -- the track is a tribute to the recently deceased garage punk icon Jay Reatard -- the track is vulnerable and mournful; at one point, Cox muses that with “sweetness comes suffering.” There’s still a whiff of the anger, neurosis, repression, and self-destruction that swirling beneath the surface, but Cox is able to synthesize this into a voice that is tender, honest and revealing. The pain is still present, but it has transformed and taken the shape of art.

Uni are a fab new glitter-rock trio from NYC featuring Nico Fuzz, David Strange, and Charlotte Kemp Muhl, best known for collaborating with Sean Ono Lennon in their psych-pop outfit The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger. The band just released their starry-eyed first single, “What’s the Problem?,” with a full-length coming out in early 2018 on Ono Lennon’s Chimera Music label. To give you a taste of what to expect, the group curated a Dowsers playlist that salutes their glitter-rock gods—and provided these highly informative, totally fact-checked, irrefutable liner notes about each song’s creation:Gentle Giant, “The Queen”This song was inspired by a notorious crossdressing hermaphrodite who lived in the underground tunnels beneath Leicester Square in the winter of 1976. She only had three teeth, ate nothing but fish and chips, and prowled the streets in a tattered sequin negligee mumbling about “Churchill’s black dog” and the “goddam war.”T. Rex, “Children of the Revolution”This song is about a stray bullet that pierced the testicle of a revolutionary soldier during the Siege of Yorktown (Virginia, Oct. 1781) and lodged itself in the ovary of an 18-year-old girl who was 300 yards away at the time. Two separate eggs were inseminated and the offspring of this most unsafe sex in history were known as the Children of The Revolution. Marc Bolan wrote this song about them.Electric Light Orchestra, “Telephone Line”Jeff Lynne was addicted to phone-sex hotlines before the advent of the internet. He squandered his vast earnings from Electric Light Orchestra on 1-800 numbers then wrote this song penniless, heartbroken, and destitute on the floor of a Telephone Booth in 1976 detailing his downward spiral like the cord of a telephone line.Sparks, “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us” This is Sparks’ magnum octopus. It’s a modern-day West Side Story that gives voice to the gentrification of Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 2017. It speaks from the voice of a Wall Street banker who purchased, tore down, and built condos on the site of a former Puerto Rican community center. Sparks makes their political statement clear in this epic manifesto.John Cameron Mitchell, “The Origin of Love” (from Hedwig and the Angry Inch) In Plato’s Symposium (or, The Drinking Party), Aristophanes, a well-known comedic playwright at the time, suggests that humans were once round balls of flesh with both male and female anatomy who rolled to and fro. Zeus, threatened by their power, cut them in two with a lightning bolt. He describes love as the human desire to be whole again by locating the missing half. Hedwig further immortalized this myth in this incredible song.Pulp, “This Is Hardcore”In 1998, after mixing quaaludes, LSD, bourbon, and Marlboro Reds, Jarvis Cocker stumbled into a Hollywood soundstage shooting a dream sequence of Busby Berkeley line dancers. Doesnt get any cooler than an emaciated, confused Jarvis being brushed by feather fans while singing "you are hardcore/ you make me hard."Elton John, “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”Elton was diagnosed with high blood sugar in 1971. Yellow Brick Road was a salt-water taffy and Rocky Mountain-style fudge shop that he used to have send chocolate-dipped potato chips, brown bears, and caramel nut patties to him on the road. “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” was a bittersweet farewell to his sweet tooth that he performed on The Muppet Show. Lou Reed, “Vicious”Lou wrote the first version of this song entirely on the cowbell. When it came time to record the track, it wasn’t coming together very well, so Lou swallowed his pride and on the recommendation of producers David Bowie and Mick Ronson, called in all of Blue Öyster Cult to lay down the initial cowbell recording that you hear featured prominently in the final version. It became the inspiration for Ian Durys “Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick” and many other classics.Oasis, “Supersonic”Oasis made this list because they’re the only band who fights with each other more than we do.David Bowie, “Life on Mars”Bowie took the chord changes from Sinatra’s “My Way” to write this song. Sinatra took the womb of Mia Farrow from Woody Allen. And Woody Allen took his daughter to be his wife. So, we hope there is life on Mars.Chrisma, “Black Silk Stocking” From 1991 to 1999, the USA Network aired a drama series called Silk Stalkings. Advertised as “crime-time TV,” in reality it was soft-core porn stitched together from the leftover plots of 1980s triple X films. Chrisma’s “Black Silk Stocking” was cited as the series’ main inspiration.Pink Floyd, “Apples and Oranges”Song about the two basic food groups.Lemon Twigs, “Frank” In 2016, Joey “Jaws” Chestnut regained the Mustard Yellow International Belt at the annual Fourth of July hot-dog-eating contest at Nathan’s Famous in Coney Island. Chestnut, 32, downed 70 hot dogs and buns in 10 minutes—the most hot dogs and buns ever eaten at the competition. That same year, The Lemon Twigs released “Frank”—a song, we assume, that’s about hot dogs and their admiration for this American hero.The Jesus and Mary Chain, “Snakedriver”Not a euphemism. Definitely a song about a chauffeur who works for a very wealthy snake.Queen, “Mister Fahrenheit”[Ed. note: Were pretty sure they mean “Don’t Stop Me Now]Undoubtedly the most debated song in rock history. The argument goes like this: If Queen is a British band, then why would they call the song “Mister Fahrenheit” and not “Sister Celsius”Marilyn Manson, “Personal Jesus” In 2005, Manson gave us his Personal Jesus. In 2013, Kanye publicly brought Jesus onstage with him. In 1964, Bob Dylan said “The Times They Are a Changin’.”The Modern Lovers, “Pablo Picasso” This is song is the handbook for any lonely guy who wants to pick up chicks.Violent Femmes, “Good Feeling”The song you hear in your head when you are trying to keep the sun from rising.Beck, “New Pollution” People really confuse the meaning of this song. An art department intern at Geffen responsible for delivering the final album files accidentally left out an “s” in the song title. It was meant to be called “News Pollution,” all about fake news. Beck smelt it back in the ’90s and was trying to warn us. Because of this one typo, the whole country believed Bill Clinton never had sexual relations with an intern, thought everything was cool in Rwanda and Burundi, were convinced Iraq had WMDs, and had no reason to think that Harvey Weinstein was anything other than guy who liked professional one-on-one meetings with all his prospective female leads. If only we knew now what Beck knew then…The Rolling Stones, “Shes a Rainbow”Definitely the best jingle that Skittles ever had in a commercial. I have no idea how they convinced the Stones to write this one for them, but we did hear that Keith ate nothing but blue skittles and vodka during the summer of 1967, so maybe this had something to do with the decision. Great song either way. Taste the Rainbow…T. Rex, “Cosmic Dancer”If all the celestial bodies in the infinite firmament of beginning-less time and the vacuum of space manifested their quarks into a private lap dance on your deathbed on the moon in the final countdown before the Milky Way exploded, it would feel exactly like this song.

Alicia Keys rode into the 21st century in a motorcade of hype, fueled by comparisons to just about every golden-voiced god of the past. Since putting out her debut album at age 20, the smooth New Yorker has been pitched as the heir apparent. Calling the record Songs in A Minor reinforced her classical music tutelage, doubling down on the line that she was an artist of substance right at the start of the Pop Idol era. Do you remember how big a hit “Fallin’” was? Keys somehow managed to tread between neo soul legitimacy and commercial prosperity.Her sound was something completely different than cyborg songstress Aaliyah’s progressive digital grooves. Instead, Keys took a vintage R&B style and deftly adding modern touches, even when working with super-producers like Kanye West and Timbaland, or providing the uptown chutzpah on Jay Z’s mega smash “Empire State of Mind.” Her recently released sixth studio album HERE isn’t quite her finest work (The Diary of Alicia Keys is my favorite of the canon), but it is in the traditional Keys vein. “I feel like history on the turntables,” she declares on opener “The Beginning (Interlude).” “Old school to new school, like nothing ever been realer.”This album finds Keys embracing her appointed role as a medium of bygone eras. It’s the distillation of decades of musical history, as well as her own body of work. She quickly namedrops two key influences: Nina Simone on HERE’s intro and Sam Cooke on first song “The Gospel,” a track that sees her bring rap to the jamboree.Elsewhere, the bluesy groove of Keys’ organ on “Illusion of Bliss” is reminiscent of ‘50s R&B belter Big Maybelle’s “Candy,” as well as The Animals’ “House of The Rising Sun” and Led Zeppelin’s more muscular blues rock. One of the most prominent instruments throughout the record is the acoustic guitar, as Keys evokes the spirit of the Delta Blues, Bob Dylan (who once name dropped her in the song “Thunder on the Mountain”) and Bob Marley. The militant march of “Pawn It All” itself sounds like a redemption song, trudging forward with the relentless stomp of Son House’s “John the Revelator.”Album standout “She Don’t Really Care_1 Luv” moves to the same summertime cookout flavor that DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince once mined from Kool and the Gang. The sleek track sees Keys’ graceful vocal moving with the satin-smoothness of ‘90s R&B, with the whole thing ending with a homage to Nas’s “One Love.” Though the influences are wide-ranging, Keys funnels them through her own distinctive lens. A decade and a half in and she’s still a key voice in commercial soul. Don’t take what she does for granted.